Cooking, usually in a bad mood

WWF Vs BBQ (For Niall)

I missed out on writing a Christmas themed post. I was too busy sledging on that white tide of cheer and booze and jaws stuffed with wrapping paper and insanely overpriced oven-bake canapes.

For a span of a few years our family dropped the turkey and trimmings ballyhoo and we all picked what we wanted to eat. None of us were huge fans of gravy and roast potatoes and massive fowl. It seemed pretty arbitrary to waste the most family centered meal of the year on a spread that none of us were super excited about. Christmas dinner is always about weighing down a mother with far too much prep while you play with toys/home electronics/radio controlled dinosaurs. Mothers are there to work on Christmas day! Therefore we lumbered mine with a bunch of different dishes. For a few years my brothers and I had cheeseburgers, my parents had fish or something and my sister would tell you she had nothing at all, she probably had chicken.

Then I moved to wanting fish stew. For a few years my go-to ‘posh’ special occasion food was a fish stew thing with fennel seeds and cream and white wine and squid and overcooked monkfish. So then me and my folks had stew, my younger brother had pizza, my older brother sulked and whined that the smell of the stew made him feel sick, and my sister would still tell you she was given nothing. Again, she had chicken.

It was all good except that I could never taste any of it. Pretty much every single year between the ages of fourteen and thirty my head would fill with a skull cracking swell of snot and phlegm and nasal dross which knocked my tastebuds out like Jake The Snake just DDT’ed ‘em. (Between the ages of fourteen and thirty I loved the beauty and ballet of WWF….)

I could have eaten wood chippings or Readybrek. I never tasted a thing.

Barbecue sauce is pretty WWF. It’s always a bit fake and sort of obvious. I’ve bought a load of the stuff and they all pretty much taste the same. Some of them are super-sweet and taste like bees who died of smoke inhalation. Some of them fall into a weird Mexican mess involving way too much paprika, cumin and corn syrup. There’s a Budweiser one. I’d rather drink a Bud. As a little digression, I LOVE Budweiser. Snobby ale drinking farmers and cord-wearers are going to dribble into their foamy sulphur and tree-root slops but fuck ‘em. I love me an ice-cold Bud. It tastes of America and hope, sort of.

Two barbecue sauce recipes follow. The first is a proper one. It started of as someone else’s I think but it’s been punched about enough that it’s mine now. The basic measures are pretty solid but everyone should have their own BBQ sauce recipe. If you are the Man From Del Monte you are going to call OJ instead of AJ. If you are French and slumming it feel free to go veal stock instead of chicken. If you are a stone-cold weirdo throw the coffee out and drip in some fruit tea.

The second ‘recipe’ is for McDonalds Barbecue Sauce. Unless you are a hardcore condiment thief you probably don’t have a stash of Ronald’s magic elixir about your person at all times. With just two ingredients you can! Fill a thermos with it and neck gobs of it in secret. Fill small plastic bags and stash them on your route to work, or on the stairs up to bed. I’m just giving you options for this stuff.